ABSTRACT
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus both examine difference in its social and political dimensions. However, if there is just one univocal plane of difference, with no transcendent outside, then ethics and politics cannot adopt some separate position of judgement. For Deleuze only the relations of alliance—the social and political differences from one tribe to another—can produce the family (a group of individuals who recognise each other as the same). One of the objections to Deleuze was that his emphasis on difference robbed us of the notion of the subject just as certain groups—such as women—were trying to claim their subjectivity. Difference, as Braidotti points out, is crucial to the understanding of identity politics. Synthesis is productive and positive difference. It is not difference as the differentiation of, or relation between, beings; it refers to the connections of becomings (an animal connecting with a plant, a man connecting with an animal, a human body connecting with another body).
